Psychology Social Psychology Introduction, Stereotypes and Prejudice
To view other notes of Psychology Click Here.
Introduction
When we read the newspaper, listen to the TV news, or browse an online news site, we see hundreds of examples of how people affect others. The media tells us which Hollywood actors are beautiful. The public reacts when a fifty-six-year-old woman gives birth to twins. A former janitor amasses a fortune and leaves it to the school where he worked.
Social psychologists try to explain how other people influence our thoughts, feelings, and behavior; how we form impressions of other people; and why stereotypes and prejudice flourish. They study how people manage to persuade, influence, and attract us. Obedience to authorities, group functioning, and helpfulness are part of social psychology as well. Social psychology acknowledges that we move in and out of one another’s lives, directly and indirectly, and all parties are, in some way, affected.
Impressions
People form impressions, or vague ideas, about other people through the process of person perception.
The Influence of Physical Appearance
Physical appearance has a strong effect on how people are perceived by others. Two aspects of physical appearance are particularly important: attractiveness and baby-faced features.
Attractiveness
Research shows that people judge attractive-looking people as having positive personality traits, such as sociability, friendliness, poise, warmth, and good adjustment. There is, however, little actual correlation between personality traits and physical attractiveness.
People also tend to think that attractive-looking people are more competent. Because of this bias, attractive people tend to get better jobs and higher salaries.
Baby-Faced Features
People’s attractiveness does not have much influence on judgments about their honesty. Instead, people tend to be judged as honest if they have baby-faced features, such as large eyes and rounded chins. Baby-faced people are often judged as being passive, helpless, and naïve. However, no correlation exists between being baby-faced and actually having these personality traits.
Evolutionary theorists believe the qualities attributed to baby-faced people reflect an evolved tendency to see babies as helpless and needing nurture. Such a tendency may have given human ancestors a survival advantage, since the babies of people who provided good nurturing were more likely to live on to reproduce.
Cognitive Schemas
When people meet, they form impressions of each other based on their cognitive schemas. People use cognitive schemas to organize information about the world. Cognitive schemas help to access information quickly and easily.
Social schemas are mental models that represent and categorize social events and people. For example, certain social schemas tell people what it means to be a spectator at a baseball game. There are also social schemas for categories of people, such as yuppie or geek. These social schemas affect how people perceive events and others. Once a social schema is activated, it may be difficult to adjust a perception of a person or event.
Stereotypes and Prejudice
Cognitive schemas can result in stereotypes and contribute to prejudice.
Stereotypes
Stereotypes are beliefs about people based on their membership in a particular group. Stereotypes can be positive, negative, or neutral. Stereotypes based on gender, ethnicity, or occupation are common in many societies.
Examples: People may stereotype women as nurturing or used car salespeople as dishonest.
The Stability of Stereotypes
Stereotypes are not easily changed, for the following reasons:
- When people encounter instances that disconfirm their stereotypes of a particular group, they tend to assume that those instances are atypical subtypes of the group.
Example: Ben stereotypes gay men as being unathletic. When he meets Al, an athletic gay man, he assumes that Al is not a typical representative of gay people.
- People’s perceptions are influenced by their expectations.
Example: Liz has a stereotype of elderly people as mentally unstable. When she sees an elderly woman sitting on a park bench alone, talking out loud, she thinks that the woman is talking to herself because she is unstable. Liz fails to notice that the woman is actually talking on a cell phone.
- People selectively recall instances that confirm their stereotypes and forget about disconfirming instances.
Example: Paul has a stereotype of Latin Americans as academically unmotivated. As evidence for his belief, he cites instances when some of his Latin American classmates failed to read required class material. He fails to recall all the times his Latin American classmates did complete their assignments.
Functions
Stereotypes have several important functions:
- They allow people to quickly process new information about an event or person.
- They organize people’s past experiences.
- They help people to meaningfully assess differences between individuals and groups.
- They help people to make predictions about other people’s behavior.
Everyday Use of Stereotypes
The word stereotype has developed strong negative connotations for very good reasons. Negative stereotypes of different groups of people can have a terrible influence on those people’s lives. However, most people do rely on stereotypes nearly every day to help them function in society. For example, say a woman has to work late and finds herself walking home alone on a dark city street. Walking toward her is a group of five young men talking loudly and roughhousing. The woman crosses the street and enters a convenience store until the young men pass, then continues on her way. Most people would say she acted prudently, even though she relied on a stereotype to guide her behavior.
Dangers
Stereotypes can lead to distortions of reality for several reasons:
- They cause people to exaggerate differences among groups.
- They lead people to focus selectively on information that agrees with the stereotype and ignore information that disagrees with it.
- They tend to make people see other groups as overly homogenous, even though people can easily see that the groups they belong to are heterogeneous.
Evolutionary Perspectives
Evolutionary psychologists have speculated that humans evolved the tendency to stereotype because it gave their ancestors an adaptive advantage. Being able to decide quickly which group a person belonged to may have had survival value, since this enabled people to distinguish between friends and enemies.
